Living Wittily

In the beginning was the Word - and then there was the Hubble

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made....and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

The mystery of vastness, the perplexing notion of infinity, the "cerebral inconveniences" of impossible mathematics, the loveliness and terror of images that reduce human significance to the omega point. That's what my new book is about - or at least that is what it's about if you can combine rational processing of data with aestheric responsiveness and an educated but not too loopy imagination.

A multi-tasking exegesis of John's Prologue might include simultaneous listening to Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001 Space odyssey), looking at these Hubble space images, saying by heart the text about the Word printed above, and asking the question with bewildered humility, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them?'

Not all theology is verbal. And not all pictures are theological. But as a human being capable of reflection and self-consciousness, I contemplate these images of the universe, and wonder, and trust, and hope, that "all indeed shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well". Julian's image of the hazelnut is more manageable -

"In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it
was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and
thought "What may this be?" And it was generally answered thus: "It is all that is
made." I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have
sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my
understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it."

A vast universe that exists because it is loved presupposes a God of love beyond telling. Stands to reason.

Good News for Babylon - Brueggemann as Old Testament Prophet

Two new books coming by Walter Brueggemann. I've been reading this Old Testament prophet for 30 years, and he is as stimulating, infuriating, rewarding and necessary as ever for those called to preach beyond the horizons of their own vision, and who therefore want their Old Testament theology "thickly textured". The phrase is Brueggemann's, and refers to the complexity of both the text and the lived experience of those of us who come to the Old Testament world millenia later, to discern and live towards the vision of God and the worldd that lies at the heart of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament gospel.

Out of Babylon (coming in November from Abingdon - see here) is the kind of book the church, emergent or submergent, now needs to read, consider and then do the hard work of asking what is the good news for Babylon today. Here's the publisher's description of what Brueggemann is about:

It was the center of learning, commerce, wealth, and religion. Devoted to materialism, extravagance, luxury, and the pursuit of sensual pleasure, it was a privileged society. But, there was also injustice, poverty, and oppression. It was the great and ancient Babylon—the center of the universe. And now we find Babylon redux today in Western society. Consumer capitalism, a never-ending cycle of working and buying, a sea of choices produced with little regard to life or resources, societal violence, marginalized and excluded people, a world headed toward climactic calamity. Where are the prophets—the Jeremiahs—to lead the way out of the gated communities of overindulgence, the high rises of environmental disaster, and the darkness at the core of an apostate consumer society? 

It costs money to read Brueggemann! His production rate means at least a couple of volumes a year. Much of his work is gathered essays, addresses and other occasional papers. But there are very few repetitions, and I've never read a Brueggemann chapter, commentary or essay without being as stated above, stimulated, infuriated or rewarded! So Disruptive Grace, a major collection of his recent pieces due in January from Fortress will be a straightforward click on the pre-order button. Here's the blurb

Walter Brueggemann has been one of the leading voices in Hebrew Bible interpretation for decades; his landmark works in Old Testament theology have inspired and informed a generation of students, scholars, and preachers. These chapters gather his recent addresses and essays, never published before, drawn from all three parts of the Hebrew Bible—Torah, prophets, and writings—and addressing the role of the Hebrew canon in the life of the church.

Brueggemann turns his critical erudition to those practices—prophecy, lament, prayer, faithful imagination, and a holy economics—that alone may usher in a humane and peaceful future for our cities and our world, in defiance of the most ruthless aspects of capitalism, the arrogance of militarism, and the disciplines of the national security state.

"Holy economics" seems like a recent theme triggered by recent events in global markets. Not so. The first two books of Brueggemann I read were The Land, and Living toward a Vision. They are both over 30 years old. Both are to do with just practices, critique of status quo, analysis of power - its use and abuse, and a searching exegesis of texts that call in question the prejudiced fundamentalism of consumer capitalism and the imperial pretensions of economy, business and global ambition. Reading Brueggemann is a cultural and moral interrogation of the way things are in the world, and the interrogator's questions are formulated in conversation with that most disruptive of texts - the Bible. 

Making room, books, shelving and an understanding friend.

Had an interesting conversation with a friend who is a joiner. Well, a ship's carpenter which means he is an elite joiner who can turn his hand to other skills as well. The problem is still fitting a library into a smaller size study without major deletions from my catalogue. So the large clothes cupboard in this modest room, given a ship's carpenter's skills, will provide another 23 feet of shelving and some filing space. The Tardis principle. Or maybe a jig saw puzzle - all the pieces only fit together one way?

While discussing the problem I mentioned a number of suggestions made by well meaning friends, that I should just downsize my library, get rid of surplus, expel the excess. Didn't mention Stuart's much more convenient suggestion to give them to him :)) Anyway, said my friend, I paraphrase, but accurately, - "I have a tool kit, and several planes, saws, chisels, hammers, and need a wee trailer to carry them to go and do a job. Your library is a tool kit - you'll get rid of something and then you'll need it. A library isn't just books - it's a lifelong collection of the things you do your work with." I love a man who understands. I showed him my prized Cambridge hardback edition of the George Herbert's poems and explained the extended mortgage needed to buy it. It's inconceivable I'd part with it. It and the vast majority of my books are not bought on impulse - they are chosen companions, resident scholars of choice, conversation partners, gifts of thought and ideas that have made me who I am. Sure some of them can go.

But I have an annual review of my whole library anyway, have done every year for decades, and a box or two go away each year to new homes. So we spent time conspiring against the limitations of space, doing the math, planning and measuring so as to have adequate shelving without the study being overwhelmingly stuffed - I also like wall space for my pictures, and a sense of beauty as well as utility. 

Books, good books and beautiful books

  There are books, good books and beautiful books. And while the contents are the thing, the physical production is not an irrelevance. Can you imagine reading your favourite book in a brown edged, split spine, dried glue crackling, acrid smelling cheap paperback. Well - yes if it was my favourite book, and the only available copy. But the enjoyment would be seriously diminished.

The ideal book is the one which has just what I want to read, well written, and contained in a volume that is attractively bound, printed on quality paper, a careful choosing of the right font, and even with features such as more than one ink colour. There is an aesthetic imperative in the production of a quality book. I'm much less dismissive of the softback or paperback than I used to be, but I can still be found guilty of paying much more for the hardcover when there is an option. There are well produced softcovers that do survive several readings, and can be opened a few years later without the spine disintegrating and the book being reduced to varied length pamphlets that need an elastic band to hold them together.

All this is because I spent some time over the weekend reading several chunks of Margaret Odell's commentary on Exekiel. That weird prophet, whose chapter one became a chapter in Chariots of the Gods, a best-selling speculative effort by Velikovsky on space ships and bible times, takes a bit of understanding. And Odell is way ahead of others in trying to interpret the outpourings of a man deeply disturbed by catastrophe, and trying to make sense of a God who permits catastrophe within a covenanted relationship with the very people on whom such catastrophe is visited.

But as well as the contents, which along with Kathleen Darr's careful and imaginative treatment in the New Interpreter's Bible are the best treatments around, Odell's book is a joy to use, read and handle. It is in the Smyth and Helwys series. It is inordinately expensive. The volumes are near impossible to source even from Amazon. The publisher's marketing approach is well nigh obstructive. But persevere. Phone Gracewing, the UK distributor. Don't visit their website unless you are an extraorinarily patient and understanding browser. Still. Several volumes including Odell's, are amongst the best exegetical helps around. Who wouldn't want Brueggemann on Kings, Fretheim on Jeremiah, Balentine on Job?

The production is lavish, expensive, includes sidebars, text boxes, varied ink text, high quality binding and paper, and it looks and feels like a volume you won't ever want to lend to anyone. That said, if my favourite book was out of print and my copy was a beat up brown edged paperback, held together with an elastic band, I'm not sure I'd lend it either. But a commentary with pictures! And sidebars. And a searchable CD. Bound in hardback with a distinctive dust-cover! Cherry pick the series, and own at least one if you appreicate high quality production of high quality content.

Novels, and the pleasures of other people's worlds

In the bookshop in St Andrews on Saturday.

Had a book token and a gift token.

Bought four novels and paid 74 pence.

Decided not to take a historical novel about Elizabethan martyrs - the blurb said, "enjoyable, bloody and brutish".

Decided I don't need any more novels about murder, mayhem and maggots.

Tried to buy a children's book, Klimt and His Cat - I do also read children's books though they have to be a bot different - this one is.

Did buy an Alexander McCall Smith for Sheila who has become a fan of this undemanding though not unsophisticated writer who seems to think human nature isn't all bleakness, blackness and bloodletting. I happen to believe he is right.

The one I'm looking forward to reading over the next couple of days, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld - one of those social novels that explores human relationships, politics and how the two inevitably affect each other, for better, for worse and in ways not so easily categorised.

A favourite writer, Daniel Silva, writes about Israeli intelligence, the new Moscow underworld and the web of power, corrutpion and greed that provides fertile soil for terrorist activity.

And I've been a fan of Douglas Kennedy ever since I read The Big Picture, and discovered that he is always rewarding as a thoughtful, knowing and sympathetic teller of people's stories as they try to find their way out of whatever life throws at tem - as the blurb says,' he delivers the message that whatever hole you dig yourself into, you're probably not alone.'

So. Some good reading over the next few days, before the van delivers our stuff to our new house, and the priorities of making home take over from the pleasures of other people's worlds.

The difference between a waste of trees and a fair price for nurturing the tree of knowledge

OK. I'm not saying I won't buy any more books. That would be like saying I'm not going to breathe for the rest of my life. But a conversation the other day had me saying something I didn't know I thought. Amongst other things, the difference between primary and secondary - no, not schools - sources. Primary and secondary sources. In mid-discussion I found myself saying the tidal wave of theological books has become wearisome. That I'd rather spend a month reading a few volumes of a really original if difficult writer than wade through serial doses of derivative, pragmatic, market hyped, Christian celebrity authored, allegedly indispensable but definitely transient stuff that has the remarkable built in capacity to make God boring. The difference between primary and secondary is the difference between original and derivative, between temporary fashion and permanent value, between a contribution to the publisher's sales figures and a contribution to knowledge, between what is a waste of trees and what might just about be a fair cost of nurturing the tree of knowledge.

Then I had another conversation about a slim book that is worth half a dozen books three or four times its length. I found myself saying that most of the really, I mean "really can't live without it" kind of books that I own, could fit in one six shelf bookcase 30 inches wide. Now don't press this too far. I'm not ready to start proving myself right or wrong about this yet. But in the past few days I've talked with College staff and/or students, University staff, and a friend on the phone about half a dozen books that are what I would call primary, original and permanent value. And none of them are big.

Life Together by Bonhoeffer is a massive book, of just over a hundred pages; it remains seminal in any discussion of what Christian community under Christ should look like. John V Taylor's The Go-Between God, written against the context of charismatic renewal and the need for a balancing statement on pneumatology, is one of the truly original and creative volumes of the last third of the 20th Century. W. H. Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense is simply the best book on pastoral theology and the nature of love that I have ever read or ever hope to. Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God is the distilled essence of modern theology, self-consciously constrained by theological tradition and responsible biblical reflection, and yet pushes the edges in order not to confine God to what we think are acceptable theological limits imposed by our ideas of soundness. Denise Levertov's Collected Poems, the textured weaving into words of the text of her life; and the two collections of R S Thomas, whose arguments with and about God, and with his own heart and many of the ways of a world both daft and beautiful, provide some of the finest spiritual writing I know. 

All of which concentrates the mind when you are moving house. Thin books are easier packed, carried and read. Thickness of book and word count, primary source of originality - interesting criteria for pruning a library.....

Parties, photos and our literary DNA

OK. After several requests and not a few demands - here's the picture - Sheila and I routinely out for a night....! Unfortunately the picture doesn't show the whole me - which included multicoloured trousers, pink gloves, luminous striped socks and lurid lime green plastic shoes. That one might yet be emailed to me, in which case, for a small fee.......

Must be a new lease of life. Or we've suddenly become socially in demand. Whatever, we are just back from another party in Aberdeen. Not fancy dress this time - a significant birthday of a good friend. But we are back in Aberdeen later this week for a 90th birthday party.

Three parties in 12 days. And each of them special because the person whose life is being celebrated is special and integral not only to our lives but to that sense of who we are, that derives from the giftedness of those relationships that define, enrich and impinge on our lives in many welcome ways. I believe deeply that we are persons in relation, and that individuality only matters when it is encompassed within the shared lives of those who move in and out and within our lives. Who these people are, how we met them, what led to the formation of such enduring connections of love, affection and friendship is part of the mystery of human relatedness, but also part of the graced gift that each person is who troubles to think any one of us worth getting to know.

So not much time for reading you'd think. True enough, but wee corners of time still found here and there. I've just finished Susan Hill's book about a year's reading of only the books already in her home. Along the way she dishes out wisdom and advice, opinion and prejudice, gossip and mini-memoirs - the book is a delight. And there are still a couple of quotes worth inserting here. The last one did get a couple of gentle correctives from Rick and Jason - you can see my comment response on Jason's blog here. Anyway, here's Ms Hill saying what I've long suspected - that the books we read deeply become part of who we are:

"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me?....What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."

 Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing (London: Profile Books, 2009), 201-2.

Internet browsing versus love of books

I know. The post title is a set up. There aren't only two alternatives. But I suspect that out there most people opt for one or the other as the default route to information.

Of course surfing the web and reading a good book aren't mutually exclusive. But I still think Susan Hill's observation comes as a dunt in the ribs to those of us too easily lured along the labyrinthine paths of that endlessly seductive land called Worldwideweb.

"Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one's ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted.

Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready meals  and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition." 

Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing, page 2.

Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.

When it comes to possessing a book, like most bibliophiles I prefer a substantial stitched hardback. Especially if it is an important book. And because I just so enjoy handling a well bound book, printed on quality paper, where font and layout and editing and production standards each contribute to a book that is a joy to hold and behold, to handle and read. And if the price is halfway reasonable then here's my money. The book below is the hardback edition of George Herbert at £90 - I got it for half the price from a sensible bookseller in Cambridge. "A thing of beauty and a joy forever".

But I also want to write in praise of the well intentioned paperback. Sometimes the hardback is ridiculously expensive and impossible to justify - and there's no paperback edition. Take for example Susan Gillingham's Psalms Through the Centuries volume 1 - £57 and the second volume will be even more expensive. And no chance of a paperback version, despite the fact that this is a series of commentaries aimed at students! So either you borrow it from a library (if it has it), or from inter-library loan - but what if it's a book you want to read and refer to often, huh? Writing to the publisher of Gillingham's book to point out the unattainability of these prices for all but institutional libraries I received a courteous negative response, essentially the same as one I first encountered and learned to live with when I was twenty one and at University.

I still have an essay I did all those years ago on the hard to make case for the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. I began with the disclaimer that much as I would like to establish the case for Mosaic authorship, the historical and textual evidence did not point that way. One of the most illuminating feedback comments I've ever had was pencilled in the margin, "Tough!" It was a hard response for a fragile young Evangelical, but one that has served me well - and I still have the essay. The lecturer was himself an agnostic who sympathised deeply with people of faith trying to re-negotiate the foundations of that faith by intellectual dialogue and critical thinking in what could seem a hostile environment.

The point is, the publisher's response for all its courteous explanations of why they couldn't afford to make the book affordable for individual purchasers, came down to that one word I learned to live with decades ago - "Tough!" Now there aren't many books I want to own that I'm not prepared to pay for, and do without other things to buy them. Choices about disposable income are real giveaway clues to our ethics, stewardship, taste, and peculiar but likeable daftness. But even I can't bring myself to spend £115 on, for example, the second volume of Michael Watts The Dissenters, a magisterial history that is simply unmatched in the subject field. The first volume was issued in both hardback and paperback - but not the second. Tough!

And likewise Carol Newsom's The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations at £66 - but a book of great originality, penetrative in its insight into how this magnificent text interprets us and our world, and our human brokenness and longing for wholeness, before we ever get near an interpretation of it. So at £66, "Tough!" But it has just been published at £13.99 in an Oxford Paperback. The lesson being, sometimes you can't get all you want - I'm still waiting for Gillingham on the Psalms to be affordable, and Watts Dissenters to not need a mortgage preceded by a credit check - so, "tough". But now and again life has unlooked for blessing - and something you want is not only affordable, but a bargain at twice the price - as is Newsom's work on Job, in paperback.

For those interested, Newsom's commentary on Job in the New Interpreter's Bible represents along with Sam Balentine's Smyth and Helwys volume on Job, the finest exegetical conversation on Job I know. And with Newsom bound in the same volume as Clinton McCann's commentary on Psalms, that NIB volume costing around £40 is simply gold at the price of lead. I exaggerate - but only very slightly.

The Bodleian Library, Gregory the Great and Regula Pastoralis

The best gifts come as a complete surprise. Even better if it's something you never even thought might come your way. At the recent gathering of UK Baptist College Principals in Oxford we had scheduled time for a visit to the Bodleian. For those who know him, you will know that Sean Winter equates the Bodleian Library with heaven proleptically anticipated. Now he's never said so in these words, but you can see words like that in his eyes when he's talking about his visits there!

Well our guide who was one of the senior members of staff, took us to a secure room where several items had been brought from special collections for us to view, and even touch. Two of those items were breathtakingly important, and left me deeply moved, and consciously privileged to be able to see them, touch them and hear them described for the treasures they are.

The first complete English book, the translation into Anglo Saxon of Gregory's "Pastoral care" by Alfred the Great, dates back more than 1100 years. And I was standing beside it, touched it, and sensed the benign weight of history in those thick parchment pages, written with painstaking care, with stylus and ink, by whatever lights were available once the sun went down. And on page after page, the glosses of successive scribes who came after, explaining, correcting, commenting. The illustration shows all this activity - though conveys little of the mystery and holy labour that was invested in translating, copying, annotating. Standing there gazing at such a gift, the miracle of Amazon, Google books and e-books begins to seem ordinary, even vulgar. Here is a book reeking of holiness, born of the hunger for sacred knowledge distilled as pastoral wisdom, celebrating the passionate patience of the scribe content to toil, reminding us that it is the faithful resolute conservation of words rightly spoken and faithfully written, that enables us to express the depths of human questing and longing for God, for love, and for the love of God.

I'll tell you about the other one later in the week.